Michigan’s Supreme Court sent a key permit for Enbridge Inc.’s (TSX: ENB) Line 5 tunnel project back to state regulators Friday, ruling that they never properly weighed how the project could extend the aging pipeline’s life and the environmental risks that come with it.
Six of the court’s seven justices sided against the commission, with Justice Elizabeth Welch authoring the majority opinion. Regulators, she wrote in the opinion, needed to determine whether the tunnel would be “the proximate cause of Line 5’s continued operation and its alleged attendant harms,” not just whether the tunnel was safe on its own, and they never weighed whether the project would harm the lakes’ protected public resources under state law. Brian Zahra, the court’s only Republican-nominated member, cast the sole vote in the commission’s favor.
Enbridge unveiled the tunnel plan back in 2018, budgeting $500 million and estimating four years to build it. Eight years on, the project still doesn’t have all the permits it needs, and Friday’s ruling means the commission has to redo part of its review from scratch.
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A state appeals court had actually upheld the same permit before the Supreme Court reversed course this week, and conservation groups note it’s the second Line 5 permit courts have now sent back to regulators. The tunnel would bury a roughly four-mile stretch of Line 5 that currently runs along the lakebed where Lake Michigan and Lake Huron meet.
Bay Mills Indian Community President Whitney Gravelle, whose tribe was among the challengers, said the decision showed “change is possible” when communities organize. Enbridge spokesman Ryan Duffy called the added delay disappointing and maintained the tunnel would “enhance environmental protection of the Great Lakes while maintaining critical energy reliability.” Attorney David Gover of the Native American Rights Fund countered that pumping oil under the Great Lakes at all is “simply a terrible idea,” tunnel or not.
Two more fights could still complicate the project. Enbridge is waiting on the US Army Corps of Engineers for a separate federal permit, which officials expect to approve soon, while Bay Mills has promised to challenge a state environmental permit the company won just weeks ago. None of this touches the pipeline already operating on the lakebed, which Enbridge has kept pumping oil through since 2020 despite Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s order to shut it down, an entirely separate fight now working its way through both state and federal courts.
